Summary:

With some people blaming solar energy for the rolling blackouts, it has been found that solar panels did what they were supposed to do, add a lot of solar energy to the grid.

Main Article:

Solar Energy is Doing Its Job and Can Help Solve California’s Energy Crisis

No one is enjoying the rolling blackouts – especially in the midst of this supremely hot summer. 

And some are blaming them on solar energy – but that is blatantly wrong. In fact, solar panels did exactly what it’s supposed to do – add a substantial amount of energy to the grid.

In fact, if you think about it, solar power works its best and contributes the most electric during the peak hours of mid-afternoon demand during the summer months. And if not for the solar panel installations on homes and businesses throughout California, including more than 5,000 in the Coachella Valley that Renova is responsible for, the outages would have lasted far longer and been more widespread.

The blame lies with power plants based on fossil fuels that failed to perform. Utilities also need to stop building and relying on large solar farms to meet their renewable energy requirements and let homeowners and businesses contribute and save money while doing it.

What’s needed is more of this distributed generation solar power and battery storage, not to build more peaker plants. Peaker plants are natural gas-fueled “helpers” that can be fired up in the event they are needed. However, they are expensive to build, expensive and dirty to operate, and have a lag time of 15 minutes or more to start producing.

Solar panels and solar batteries, on the other hand, have power that is immediately accessible, relatively inexpensive to build, and clean to operate. In an article published in 2018, a study by GTM Research and Wood Mackenzie suggested that in the U.S. alone, solar batteries could overtake peaking plants in as little as four years.

Since the last crisis related to energy in 2001, nine gigawatts (GW) of local solar energy have been installed at more than a million customer sites throughout California. Without those solar power systems helping to lower peak demand at 3 p.m. (which is when California’s electricity needs actually peak), the strain would have been much greater.

But because the electricity generated by solar power systems is consumed entirely on local circuits, the data from CALISO (California Independent System Operator) doesn’t reflect the contribution of local solar power and solar energy storage.

It oversees the operation of California’s bulk electric power system, transmission lines and electricity market generated and transmitted by its member utilities, but its conclusions wrongly make it look like Californians are using more power at 6 p.m. than at 3 p.m.

CALISO only manages the centralized grid and no other energy regulator (CEC or CPUC) has stepped in to communicate the complete picture.

As the California Solar & Storage Association Executive Director Bernadette Del Chiaro says, the problem with this is it gives the impression that solar energy is either not doing its job or it is irrelevant to today’s energy needs (or both). Nothing could be further from the truth. 

We can solve the day and evening peak demands with more energy storage powered by solar panels, not more fossil plants. An additional three gigawatts of battery storage will solve the need by being immediately accessible all the time and rolling blackouts could be eliminated.

Want to go Solar? See how much you can save before the installer comes out by using the HahaSmart price checker tool and you can customize your solar-powered system with the design DIY tool.